This is a long and excellent book, though a rare one, and is George Manville Fenn at his very best. It starts in California, where several settlers had been trying to gain a living as fruit-growers, but the various blights and insects were getting the upper hand, and failure was in the air all round. One day an aged and deranged old prospector comes there, having walked in from the mountains and salt-plains, many hundreds of miles away. He has a belt with some excellent samples of gold, and a story that there are ancient cities out there, where gold is abundant. He has a few lucid moments just before dying. Some of the settlers decide that they might as well give up, and go in search of these gold-mountains and their ancient cities.

The distances are huge. There are episodes with rattle-snakes which are brilliantly written. Eventually they come to one of these cities, carved into the rock. They find evidence that the city had been sacked by invaders, many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years before. But while they are there they are attacked by a large number of Apaches, whom eventually they manage to beat off by an ingenious trick. So they are once again on their travels. They spend several years, but never manage to find the gold-mountains, though they do find another sacked city. Eventually they decide that enough is enough, and they make their way back to their original fruit-farms, where they find all the other neighbouring settlers gone, but to their surprise they find their own farms blooming with excellent fruit, natural predators for the blights and scale-insects having arrived on the scene. So they move back into their old farm buildings, and carry on their businesses.

There are several adults, all men, in the story, but the principals are two lads whose fathers are leading the expedition. Another hero is an American settler, who has great wisdom and character, having much more experience of the wilderness than any of the others. Other important characters are the mules that carry their equipment, and also the extremely important water kegs. The horses are very important, too. You will love this book, especially if you can make it into an audiobook, but it will be one of no mean duration.

George Manville Fenn lived from 1831 to 1909, and was a prolific writer of boys' adventure stories. He also wrote serialised books for the various boys' periodicals.

The feature that is common to most of his books is the method of sustained suspense that he employed. He wrote, in explaining this, that he relied upon the human desire to unravel a mystery, to retain his readers' attention. He was able to retain their interest right up to the very last page, by building up mysterious and dire situations one upon the other. You are constantly left asking, "How does he get out of this one?" It is just this aspect that makes transcribing his books to e-texts such fun.

George Manville Fenn, English writer of juvenile stories, was born in London January 3, 1831. He was educated at private schools, then attended Battersea Training College for Teachers from 1851 to 1854. He was Master of a small school in Lincolnshire for a time, then became a printer and published a small magazine of poetry, "Modern Metre," in 1862. Two years later he was part owner of the Hertfordshire and Essex Observer, another unsuccessful venture. He then began writing for various periodicals, such as Chamber's Journal and All the Year Round, and was editor of Cassell's Magazine in 1870, and of Once a Week from 1873 to 1879. He soon began to pour out a flood of books for boys, as well as a few novels, many of which were reprinted in America, and before his death he had published between 175 and 200. He was married in 1855 to Susanna Leake, and by her had two sons and six daughters. He died August 26, 1909.

A PDF of scans and an HTML version of this book are provided. We also provide a plain TEXT version and full instructions for using this to make your own audiobook. To find these click on the PDF, HTML or TXT links on the left.

These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane e-Books. Most of the books are concerned with the sea, but in any case all will give a good idea of life in the nineteenth century, and sometimes earlier than that. This of course includes attitudes prevalent at the time, but frowned upon nowadays.

We used a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner to scan the pages. We then made a pdf which we used to assist with editing the OCRed text.

To make a text version we used ABBYY Finereader 8 to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to find misreads and improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made a CD with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak or TextAloud MP3. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.

The resulting text can be read either here at the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews